“What else do you want me to do?”
“Uh,” Sin suggested, “not use him?”
“I haven’t taken the Aventurine Circle sigil, which lets you get the stored power from their circle of stones. Gerald has a new mark that allows all the magicians to exchange power between them, and I haven’t taken that either. Using Nick was absolutely the only way I could avoid taking the marks. Having him, and more power than anyone else, is the only reason they let me stay.”
“And why do you want to stay?” Sin inquired.
Jamie looked down at Lydie’s head. “To help.”
“Forgive me if I think you might have another motive,” Sin said. “I can see you’re brimful of magic right now. Everyone at the Market knows how magicians kill more, the longer they’re in a circle. The appetite grows by what it feeds on—the craving gets worse and worse. If you were safe, if the circles were gone, would you give up all the magic the demon gives you? Could you give it up?”
Jamie kept looking at Lydie, and not into Sin’s eyes, but he did answer her.
Low and soft, he said: “No.”
At least he sounded ashamed.
“So you’d rather enslave a friend than give up power,” said Sin. “And you expect me to believe you want to help?”
“I came and sat down beside you with a magic knife in the pocket nearest to you,” Jamie said. “Either I want to help you, or I’m kind of dumb.”
Sin hesitated. “I don’t know you that well. You could be all kinds of dumb. What I know for sure about you is that you’re a magician. Power runs through your veins, more essential than blood. You can’t tell me you could give it up.”
“No,” Jamie answered, his voice stronger this time. “I can’t.”
“Nick trusted you, and you’re using him,” Sin said. “Maybe you hate the other magicians. But power obviously comes first with you. So I can’t trust you.”
“That’s true,” Jamie said. “But you can pick up your knife. I hope you will take that as the goodwill gesture it is, and not the chance to chop my head off, which… it also is.”
Sin walked across the deck to her other knife. She scooped it up in one movement and wheeled back around to Jamie.
With both knives in her hands she felt calm again, the sound of them slicing air like a lullaby in the dark. She held her arms crossed, poised to kill anything that hurt her family.
She allowed herself to look at Lydie.
Lydie was being brave, taking short, panting breaths but not crying. She stared at Sin silently, her eyes huge, and Sin nodded at her and saw she was being held quite gently, and quite far away from Jamie. As if she was a peace offering, and not a shield.
Sin tucked one of her knives into the belt of her jeans, so she had one hand free.
“I’ll give you your magic knife for my sister.”
“Done,” said Jamie. He took his hands off Lydie’s shoulders and flung them up to catch the knife Sin hurled, at the same second Lydie threw herself at Sin.
Sin checked Lydie’s rush and pushed her sister behind her. “Stay calm,” she said. “I’ve got you.”
She kept her gaze steady on Jamie, who was holding the knife tight in one hand without opening it.
“Thank you,” Jamie said. “It’s my lucky charm. I don’t mean that in a serial killer way.”
“You have a lucky knife, but you don’t mean that in a serial killer way?”
“That’s right,” said Jamie, with a little smile. “I’m harmless, I promise.”
She didn’t believe he was harmless for a second.
Since she had got to know Alan better, she had been thinking about different sorts of acts.
This boy, with his hunched-in shoulders, his flood of so many words it was hard to pay attention to any of them, he was camouflaging himself.
Since he’d been living a normal life while secretly a magician up until a couple of months ago, camouflaging himself must be second nature to him.
“Whose side are you on?” Sin asked directly.
“My own,” Jamie said. “And my sister’s. I promised her I would help you.”
“And how do you intend to help me?”
Jamie grinned at her. “Like this,” he said, and made a sweeping gesture.
The whole boat rocked with the wave that went shuddering through the river.
“Jamie, you might want to think about taking it down a notch,” Alan said. Sin saw him from the corner of her eye, gripping the door frame so he didn’t fall down.
“Everyone’s a critic,” Jamie muttered. He repeated the gesture, this time in miniature.
The river moved, nudging the boat gently but inexorably toward one of the riverside walls. There was a flight of shallow, slimy stone steps set in the wall. They were the most beautiful things Sin had ever seen.
Jamie’s forehead was creased with concentration, his hands moving in short, careful gestures as if he was embroidering some priceless silk.
The boat edged forward, and forward, and then finally reached the steps. There was a small crunching sound as the boat rocked against them.
“I’ll hold it,” Jamie said. “You can go.”
Sin ran forward to the rail of the deck, Lydie’s feet pounding beside hers. She heard Alan limping after them.
She heard Celeste Drake’s voice from the doorway Alan had just left.
“Leaving so soon?”
Sin spun and threw her knife. Or she meant to. It did not even leave her hand, staying rigidly in place as if she had stuck it in a block of ice rather than throwing it through the air.
There were three men behind Celeste, Sin saw, and then recounted. There was one man she didn’t know, and there was Seb, who might or might not be on Celeste’s side, and shoving viciously past them both was Nick.
“Come here,” Jamie commanded, beckoning.
“I am trying,” Nick snarled, and the magician Sin didn’t know went for Nick with his hands full of black light.
“Hey!” said Jamie, and made a gesture that sent the man reeling back a step. Nick closed in on him hungrily.
Celeste snapped a look over at Seb, who shrank back, then at Sin with her knives and Alan with his gun out. She had both her hands raised, palm up. On anyone but a magician, the gesture would have looked like surrender.
On a magician, it was a threat.
“Go ahead,” Celeste said. “Shoot me. Stab me. If you’re both quite sure I won’t have time to hit that child before you do.”
Sin did not look away from Celeste’s hands. She could not afford to.
Now they had turned, Lydie was in front of her, pressing with the urgency of terror against her legs. Sin saw Celeste’s eyes narrow, measuring the distance between them.
In a far-off way, she noted the sounds of Jamie and Nick fighting the magician. There was the sound of a sky turning savage above them, a grumble rising too fast into a snarl.
Nobody could use magic in the Aventurine Circle’s territory but them. Except that Jamie was part of the Circle, and Nick was Jamie’s.
Despite this, Sin knew that Celeste, and the man fighting Nick and Jamie, were both wearing the magician’s mark Gerald had invented, the one that let magicians channel the power of all the magicians in their Circle who wore the mark. And Celeste would have been formidable on her own.
Sin felt Alan tense beside her. They both knew a shot was their best chance, but if Celeste was enchanted to withstand a shot, there would not be any other chances.
There was a short, sharp crack.
Celeste staggered forward. Sin seized the moment to grab Lydie and shove her over the side, onto the steps. Lydie’s hand closed on the chain round Sin’s wrist for a moment, clinging.
“Lydie, go!” Sin yelled, and twisted back around.
In the doorway stood Mae, holding a gun in both hands. She was wavering slightly in her high, high heels.
Celeste Drake had not been enchanted to withstand gunshots.
She lay sprawled on the deck. The gauze of her long dress fluttered in the rising wind, a pure white shroud with a dark red stain marring it at the center.
The storm rose so fast it was like an eclipse. For a moment Sin could not see, but she stumbled forward anyway, fumbling in the dark. She went down on her hands and knees on the deck where she guessed Celeste’s body lay.
Lightning flashed. Mae was looking down at Sin, her face all shadows and pallor, as if she instead of Celeste had died and become a ghost.
Sin’s gaze dropped to Celeste, to the hollow of her throat where the falling rain had already begun to pool. Her throat was bare. The pearl was gone.
Mae had won, then.
“C’mon,” Nick said, his own opponent dead behind him. He gave Mae a solid push, and she almost stumbled and fell onto Celeste’s body. Nick dragged her past Sin and Celeste to the side of the boat, then let go of her so he could help Alan over.
Mae tried to climb over after him by herself and started cursing.
“Stupid dress, stupid shoes—”
“You’re stupid,” said Nick, and scooped her up bodily in his arms. He held her over the rail and Alan grabbed her hands and pulled her onto the steps to safety. “Now you,” Nick said.
Jamie leaned against the ship rail. “No.”
“Oh my God, you’re both stupid,” Nick snarled. “Do you want to die? Because if you stay, you will.”
Alan limped to the top of the steps as fast as he could and Sin saw Lydie, a tiny figure against the dark-torn sky, come rushing to him.
That was what snapped Sin out of her paralysis. Too late.
She had scarcely uncurled from beside Celeste’s body when they all heard, clear even accompanied by the sound of the storm, a lot of footsteps coming up the steps.
Jamie’s eyes met his sister’s. For a moment Sin thought that would be it, that they would all just run.
“We’ll see,” said Jamie, and lifted his hand.
The boat was torn away from the side of the wall as if Jamie had ripped a piece of paper off a notebook. Sin made an enraged sound, Mae and Alan and her sister suddenly just black dots almost disappearing against the gray sky, almost entirely lost to her.
“Don’t—,” she began, advancing on Jamie, and he spun toward her with his eyes blazing white.
Blackness blasted her vision as she was knocked off her feet and across the deck, rolling and hitting the other side of the boat. The door opened. There was a shallow shelf on this side of the boat, with rope coiled upon it. Sin rolled under it.
She would be half-hidden by its shadow. Unless someone looked too closely.
As a dozen magicians burst on the scene, though, it was clear that at least for now all their attention was focused on Celeste’s body.
The sword-wielding magician called Helen went down on her knees beside Celeste. It gave Sin a strange feeling to watch the woman touch Celeste’s hair, as pale a blond as her own. She wondered if they had been related, sharing that as well as a Circle.
Some of the magicians looked truly grief-stricken and horrified. There were others, not just magicians but messengers, among whom Sin spotted Phyllis, who simply looked scared.
Gerald stood at Celeste’s feet, his head bowed and his hands clasped for a moment. When he looked up, Sin could read nothing on his face.
“Jamie,” he said, his voice as unruffled as his expression, mild and calm. “Perhaps you can explain this to me?”
“The Market people came for the girl and her sister. We were attacked and overpowered,” Jamie said flatly.
The storm had quieted into a dark muttering in the sky, which seemed muffled by the blanket of clouds that made the whole world dim. The glow of Jamie’s magic gaze seemed like the only light in the world, and that light was a terrible one.
“Perhaps you can explain this to me in some way I might believe,” Gerald suggested, his voice even softer than before.